Due to our intelligence, we stand separate from the mountains, the trees, the wind and all other animals within the great design of nature. Simply by being human we find ourselves in a position of compromising the natural equilibrium by wanting to take apart, name and classify for the sake of survival. Our consciousness with its own rules of rationality exists outside of natural cycles. We have tried to control events through magic, ritual and science and have defended ourselves through an innate will, yet we remain overwhelmed by nature's complexity.

I found a totally different vision, abstract figuration if you wish, with all this energy playing on the canvas through different colours, weights, shapes and pressures. I saw all of these shapes in a granite mountain cutting through the sky or in a black river flowing through a field of snow. I realized that I could explore the painted metaphor without going into some kind of surrealistic fantasy land or end up painting a black canvas.

When I am outside, I feel that I'm not part of the rain falling. I'm not the leaf on the tree. I am challenged and inspired by nature but because I have a will, I question my environment. Civilization began with the cycles of days and seasons. Our logic assumes the same predictability in all things but is tempered by the knowledge of our limits. Although we try our best through the scientific observation of different phenomena, our conclusions are based on conjecture.

Our parallel existence with nature is one of the metaphors in my work. If the sky looks a certain way it portends the weather. If the water is black we can anticipate that it's cold. With these observations I compose landscapes.

The lines of a river digging into the land, the shape of a volcano or the effect of cumulous clouds being pushed by the wind show up in the way we invent or engineer things simple or technologically complex. A dam imitates a waterfall, the motif parallels the reality. Nature is as different from imitation as it is similar. The waterfall however, seems to work better than the dam. In that difference I see man. You see the size we are compared to the universe. We have now begun to imitate ourselves. Computer technology is a reflection of what we assume to be human thought process, which I find interesting yet troubling.

I work in consideration of the evolution of the visual image and of the significance of the physical qualities of a painting. In reference to remembered experience, I create an imaginary space in which a viewer may choose to participate.

What artists know is reflected in their work. I am a painter in this time of an abundance of images. I want to be conscious of that and at the same time let that work itself through me as an artist.

There is one way of making a landscape that you feel as you're sitting on the tip of an island and you're looking all around and there's no land and you see the curve in the earth. That's the only thing that tells you that you are on a planet and it's the only thing that matters for a while. It's the figuration of silence, a little bit like when you go outside and you just want five minutes of peace. You close the door behind you and it's quiet.

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